Articles with the Tag Fantastic Four

Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 2
Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and friends
Reprints: Fantastic Four #21-40 and Annual 2 (December 1963 – July 1965)
Get this for: Lee and Kirby gathering steam — Five stars

The second volume of Essential Fantastic Four opens with a story that should not work, but does. The Fantastic Four fight a new villain, the Hate-Monger, who is stirring up race hatred, class hatred and religious hatred throughout the country and even manages to set our heroes against each other. Which is bad luck for Nick Fury, who needs them to stop the rebellion in San Gusto which the Hate-Monger is also behind, but with a bit of trickery he manages to get all the bickering members to the little South American country. Of course they manage to defeat the Hate-Monger in the end, overcome their differences and reveal who he really is: Adolf Hitler. Even in 1963 this was corny as hell, but somehow Jack and Stan manage to make it work.

It’s a good example of their growing power as storytellers both individually and as a team. In the first twenty issues of Fantastic Four they were finding out what did and did not work, with some misfires along the way and here they’re building on that foundation. The basics are in place, they know who the characters are, what they can and cannot let them do, how they react to a given situation. Was for e.g the Thing in the first volume still a figure of menace, somebody who could erupt at any moment and become a true monster rather than just looking like one, here he has mellowed to still grumpy but essential loveable, still inclined to lash out in anger, frustration or irritation but never with the intent to hurt anyone. Mr Fantastic in the same way has evolved from the brainy, detached scientist to somebody with deep seated passions normally kept hidden, who scares even his team mates and friends when these passions are unleashed.

Villains too get more multidimensional, with both Doctor Doom and the Submariner becoming more sympathetic in the process. The latter was always more an antihero than a real villain and his own moral code is developed further here, to the point where the Fantastic Four end up fighting alongside him against the menace of a real underwater tyrant, Attuma. Doom on the other hand never becomes an ally of the Fantastic Four, but is made a tragic figure through his origin, told in the second Fantastic Four Annual. It turns out he’s a gypsy, whose mother was killed when he was still a baby and whose father died fleeing for his life from a local baron when he was a small boy. He swears vengeance, starts studying the black arts of his mother, as well as educating himself into science (no finer distinction really necessary in an universe in which a biochemist can create a malevolent artificial intelligence from scratch), gets a scholarship at the same university as Reed Richards and Ben Grimm, tries to contact the netherworld and gets blown up, is thrown out, travels the world and ends up with a mysterious sect of monks in Tibet and becomes Dr Doom. Even the Skrulls when turning up again turn out not to be all bad.

The stories in this volume are in essence midway between the realive realism with which the Fantastic Four started out and the wild, unrestrained imagination Kirby especially would bring to the title in its more mature years. The stories are based around some supervillain or other menace threatening the team or the world or both and the Fantastic Four defeating it. There’s a healthy dose of soap opera as well, revolving around the Thing and his desire to become Ben Grimm again, become human again and his fear that this will mean losing Alica Masters, his girlfriend, as well as around Mr Fantastic and the Invisible Girl and the love they share but are afraid to speak out. The Invisible Girl at the same time also evolves both in power and personality, getting to be a somewhat less stereotypical comics girl, though still vulnerable to being a professional hostage at times.

On the art front, Kirby’s art gets wilder, more experimental, as he integrates photographic backgrounds in his art, develops ever more baroque looking weaponry, vehicles and scientific equipment. His figures and the way they stand and move gets more exagerrated too, underscoring the theatricality of many of Stan Lee’s scripts. The effect of reading a concentrated dose of Kirby art is, as I’ve mentioned before that I start seeing those Kirby Poses and Kirby Figures in real life. Watching sport is especially good for this…

As good as the first volume of Lee/Kirby Essential Fantastic Four was, this volume was better. One of those times when essential is no hyperbole, but the honest truth.

Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 1
Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Dick Ayers and friends
Reprints: Fantastic Four #1-20 and Annual 1 (November 1961 – November 1963)
Get this for: the birth of a legendary comics run — Five stars

One of the first essential volumes published back in October 1998, The Essential Fantastic Four vol. 1 contains stories that should be familiar to any longtime Marvel fanboy or girl. If you haven’t read them in reprints, they have been referred to so much that it feels as if you’ve read them. Myself, I guess I’ve read roughly half of the issues collected here before and knew about most of the others. So I tought I knew what to expect even though it had been years since I’ve last read these stories. I remembered them as slightly on the dull side, typically early Marvel where you can see the potential (as with The Hulk yesterday) but it isn’t quite realised yet.

I was wrong.

Reading these first twenty issues, plus the annual in one sitting made me realise how good Lee and Kirby were right from the start. Even the origin story, repeated ad nauseam over the decades is fresh when you read the original. Lee starts the story with a bang and never lets up, building the tension from the start. Jack Kirby’s art is more subdued than Classic Kirby, more realistic and low key. And even if “Central City” is mentioned here, it’s clear the action takes place in New York. Throughout the stories here there is a sense that they do not take place in a vacuum, but in the world outside your window, fantastic as the adventures, settings and villains are. What it reminds me of is Tintin, or Carl Barks’ Uncle Scrooge, two other adventure series that have a strong sense of reality about them, even if one stars a never aging boy reporter and the other pantless anthromorphic ducks. Quality wise too these Lee + Kirby stories are on a par with Tintin’s or Barks’ best.

The art is so good here, so fluid and full of grace but always in service to the story. Kirby has great fun depicting the Fantastic Four using their powers: the Thing’s brute force, the Torch playing with fire, the Invisible Girl’s use of her power to gain the upper hand on villains dismissing her as a professional hostage and especially Mr Fantastic’s stretching. His compositions are great as well — just look at the covers, especially issue 12.

Meanwhile Lee’s writing sparkles: there’s no dull plot in the bunch, he has as much fun getting the FF’s characters right as Kirby has in showing the work: the Thing’s gruff exterior hiding a pussycat, Mr Fantastic being one step ahead of his team mates but caring deeply for them, the Torch’s hotheadedness and the Invisible Girl’s worrying. As per usual with Lee, he uses a thousand words where somebody else could’ve done it with ten, but it never grates here as it did with The Incredible Hulk. The dialogue is witty, there are few unnecessary captions or thought balloons and it all flows as naturally as the art does.

And the villains here are great: the Mole Man, Skrulls and Super Skrull, Namor the Submariner, Miracle Man, The Puppet Master, the Mad Thinker, Rama Tut and of course Doctor Doom. Doom appears in five of the twenty stories here yet never bores. Each time he returns he gets better. The Submariner is the same and even the Puppet Master, so incredibly boring when used by almost everybody else is great here.

But you know what the best thing about this volume is? As great as these Fantastic Four stories are, they will only get better!